Sunday, April 7, 2019

Sunday Rerun: Fake News!

It has become the popular thing to do, when someone sees news they don't care to acknowledge as being true, to deny it altogether.Peggy has a friend who would, when confronted with developments she did not wish to handle, say, "That can't be part of my reality!"Ah. But it can be, and it was, and "that's all she wrote," as they used to say.A certain fairly prominent politician (I won't mention his name out of concerns for his well-being) is either clever enough, or has people around him clever enough, to have come up with the mantra "FAKE NEWS!" when he really means "NEWS I DON'T LIKE!" And buttressed (emphasis on the first four letters) by his example, his acolytes are all over social media screaming that things are fake. The other night, when a departing Twitter employee made his last action, before donning his hat and coat and walking out the door, the shutting down of the presidential tweetstorm, Twitter tweeted that the account had been shut down by human error, before finding that, indeed, mischief had been afoot.Well, sir, here came the Cult 45'ers, not having seen the update, screaming that this was fake news! Which it was not. Fake news is saying the Dodgers won the World Series this year, that the Civil War was fought over naming rights to Fort Sumter, or saying that "the word, one of the greatest of all terms I've come up with, is 'fake' " when you want to claim that you yourself made up the word "fake". We've all heard the preposterous stories that people use to wriggle out of jams, and the question, "Who are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?" It really does come down to one's willingness to believe certain people in the face of all facts, and that's to be expected from us humans.But, it's better to say, "We have to change this situation to make it better" when the flood in the basement is halfway up the cellar steps than it is to deny that there's water down there.